Every few weeks, I share provocative ideas about culture, consciousness, and creativity, alongside beautiful artwork, in my newsletter. I also host the Hurry Slowly podcast, teach online courses, and practice energy work. Learn more at: www.jkg.co
When the cosmic becomes comic 🌚 😂 🌎
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Hi Friends- I am waving from the steely fog of winter in the Catskills. 😶🌫️ We’ve just hit that early-February tipping point where the facade has dropped and no one is pretending they’re fine anymore. I bump into acquaintances on my morning pup walks, and we swap notes about the relentless gray skies and how it’s impacting our mental health. I was texting with a friend the other day, saying that I just felt like burying my head in the sand. (But that I had a lot of work to do.) She said: Head in the sand is a different kind of “productive.” I agreed but said that I might have already had my head in the sand for so long that I was starting to wonder if maybe I had my head up my own ass. She said: Head up the ass is a different kind of “productive.” 😂 Indeed it is. We can’t always go from strength to strength. Or productive to productive. Sometimes we need to be lost, to be searching, to be gestating. That’s what the new episode of Hurry Slowly I just dropped is about: The tension between “the urgency of productivity” and the “creative necessity” of gestation and ripening. I contemplate how we can navigate that tension: Between an external world that is deeply attached to the value of urgency and our internal world, which yearns to wonder and wander and play and rest and explore without a deadline. Listen to “The Tyranny of Urgency” → I am also ripening into an official announcement for an exciting new community project that will launch around the spring equinox. The website and other details won’t be unveiled for another few weeks, but I wanted to share a little sneak preview. The community is going to be called Kiln, and it’s a 6-month-long creative incubator that offers folks the container, the accountability, the support, the momentum, and the 🔥 you need to take a half-baked idea and make it into something real. You might have a specific creative project that you really want to move the needle on, or maybe it’s a new business idea, or maybe it’s simply re-committing to and reactivating a creative practice that feeds you… any and all of these goals will be in alignment with participating in this community. And I will be right there with you — because this project is responding to both an internal and an external need for me. I am working on a new book about “tender discipline” and I don’t want to do it in isolation! I want to bring together an amazing group of creative, heartfelt folks to create a generative space that allows us all to thrive and build momentum around the ideas and the creations that matter most. So if you’ve got a project, or an idea, or a practice that you’d like to build 🔥 around… stay tuned! I’ll be sharing more in a few weeks. – In the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about your energy system, I’ll be sharing tools & techniques for comforting, nourishing, grounding, and rebalancing in my Radiant Attention workshop on Sunday, February 11th. It will be an intimate gathering to learn powerful, self-healing techniques that will serve you again and again. Sending you lots of love, When the cosmic becomes comic.If the universe has had one message for me over the past 18 months, it has been: "Lighten up." In every possible sense of what that phrase can mean — adding light where there is darkness, inviting ease where there is difficulty, releasing burdens wherever possible, and most of all — not taking everything so seriously. All of which has invited me into a meditation on comedy. So I was pleased when I recently stumbled onto Austin Kleon's post about Joseph Meeker's book The Comedy of Survival from 1974. In it, Meeker proposes facing the world in a "comic mode." Here's the excerpt Kleon shares: Comedy is not a philosophy of despair or pessimism, but one which permits people to respond with health and clear vision despite the miseries the world has to offer. Its mode is immediacy of attention, adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances, joy in small things, the avoidance of pain wherever possible, the love of life and kinship with all its parts, the sharpening of intelligence, complexity of thought and action, and strategic responsiveness to novel situations. It permits people to accept themselves and the world as they are, and it helps us make the best of the messes around us and within us. Meeker proposes "comic mode" as a kind of antidote to what he calls "tragic mode," or what astrologist Diana Rose calls "hard mode." I recently came across a post on Rose's Instagram that reads: "Hard Mode is not more virtuous, it's just harder." Which nicely points a finger at the virtuousness that we can derive from our struggles (even if they're self-inflicted) and/or the pride we can feel in taking on too much and putting ourselves in a position of martyrdom. As I reflect on comedy, I'm thinking about what it would mean to play the Fool rather than the Martyr. What would it mean to be the tender trickster who can re-orient us toward lightness with just the right question, turn of phrase, or gesture? What would it mean to take a playful attitude toward the inherent discomfort of life? Of the creative process? Of awakening? When I originally saved the link to Kleon's post, I accidentally mis-labeled it as "cosmic mode vs tragic mode". A mistake that later felt like the perfect reframe — to recognize that the key to lightness, the key to comedy, is always zooming out. To see my/your/our problems within the bigger picture, within the grandeur of the cosmos. To be in awe at the wonder of the world and our own smallness in it. There's an old saying that comedy = tragedy + time. So it's no surprise that in a world where we feel like we never have enough time, nothing seems that funny. We fall so deeply in love with our plans, with making progress, that we become humorless. There's no time for detours, for wandering, for wondering. I am wondering how I can find the mystery in the mistakes — where the comic becomes cosmic and the cosmic becomes comic. I am wondering how I can embrace the detours as teachers — or better yet as meandering explorations that don't even need to contain a "lesson." I am wondering how I can allow (compassionate) laughter can be the release gasket for pent-up psychic pain. I am wondering how I can call myself in rather than calling myself out. I am wondering how I can find comedy in the melody that is me. I am wondering.
LINK ABOUT IT The creative process IS the process of not knowing what you are doing. I recently returned to this lovely interview with Laurel Braitman by Anne Helen Petersen. So much insight on the creative process, imposter syndrome, and the mechanics of grief: "Your question about 'how I learned to write' makes me laugh. I immediately asked myself 'I know how to write?' You’d think writing two books and teaching writing would make me think it’s something I know how to do. But the answer is that I feel, in my deepest core, that I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s mostly guesswork. Maybe this is something to talk to my therapist about lol. But I actually think it’s the feeling of the creative process itself. The 'how-am-i-going-to-do-this' feeling is actually the feeling of doing it." Grief decomposes our love like a body. A beautiful piece on grief from the Energetic Ecologist: "Grieving is an actively Alive process. It is the sign of a healthy, embodied ecosystem. It is an indication of not only Death, but Life, of Becoming, and Becoming on Behalf of the Dead (and/or that which is dead). When left uninterrupted and given the ideal environmental conditions to facilitate its process, grief has its own life cycle. And in order for this life cycle to complete itself, our Love must be swallowed whole, and sometimes we have to be swallowed up with it." You have to let the muse sleep. I appreciated this tender remembrance of the poet Wanda Coleman and her beautiful and fierce poem "Moon Cherries." Here's Coleman on creativity and inspiration: "'That’s just the muse sleeping. You’ve got to let her sleep,' she said of my muse. 'You have to be patient with her. She can’t give you the good stuff all the time. She needs to rest as much as you do.'" An ultra-marathoner gets wrecked by Taylor Swift's treadmill workout. How do you know if someone is a toxic person? (Comic mode) Wealth shown to scale. (A terrifying work of art.) On personal brands and changing names. How language shapes the way we think. Link ideas from: Maya C. Popa, Lisa Clapper, Austin Kleon, and Sebene Selassie.
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Jocelyn K. Glei
Reflections on culture & consciousness
Every few weeks, I share provocative ideas about culture, consciousness, and creativity, alongside beautiful artwork, in my newsletter. I also host the Hurry Slowly podcast, teach online courses, and practice energy work. Learn more at: www.jkg.co
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